September 3, 2010 scottcjones 6Comments

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In a medium that moves only a couple miles per hour shy of the speed of light, many aspects of gaming are constantly being cast aside and left behind. One such aspect is the old if-you’re-stuck-dial-this-number tip line.

Back in the ’90s, before the Internet roamed the earth, you were basically shit out of luck if you found yourself at an impasse while gaming. Your options were to 1) hope the subsequent issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly addressed your particular impasse (sometimes it did; sometimes it didn’t), or 2) dial a phone number for a dollars-per-minute charge and speak with a gaming expert who could talk you through your problem.

I’m not the most skilled gamer on Earth. I think of myself as persistent more than anything else. I don’t give up on a game easily, especially if I’ve spent $60 on it. But even I have my limits. Back then, after a few nights of back-to-back-to-back frustration, I’d usually reach for the phone.

I hated these moments. Dialing the 900 number was an admission of defeat. “I can’t do this. This game has gotten the better of me.” Etc.

It also felt shameful somehow. I called a few sex lines in college. You know, just to see what they were like. Usually I got some woman who was slurring her words from an obvious vodka drunk, asking me if I was “mama’s dirty boy.”

I was speaking with a woman named Peaches once when she asked me if I had my “pecker out.” There is nothing remotely alluring about the word “pecker.” I hung up on Peaches and then moped around the rest of the night in my apartment, feeling ashamed of myself, and ashamed of the credit card charges I’d accrued just to listen to a strange woman slur the word “pecker.”

I felt a similar kind of shame when dialing the game-expert hotlines. I’d start pressing the numbers and think: “Am I really going to go through with this?” And then another voice inside my head would say: “Yes, you are going to go through with this because you can’t afford to waste one more night of your terrible life searching for the seven Cuccos for that one lady in Kakariko Village.”

All the bigger companies — Nintendo, Capcom, Konami — had hotline numbers at the time. But the only one I called regularly was the Nintendo hotline. Zelda games were the bane of my existence. There always seemed to be something I needed but couldn’t find, or something that I’d found but couldn’t figure out how to use. I basically spent the bulk of Ocarina of Time just walking around and playing my ocarina every couple of feet in the hopes that something magical might happen. Sometimes something magical happened. Most of the time, nothing happened.

I’ve been a gamer all my life, but I’ve struggled with feeling OK about my love of games. I love them now, unapologetically, but when I was younger I desperately wanted to think of myself as a Serious Person. I brooded a lot in coffee shops. I read “The Iliad” in public. Gaming was not something a Serious Person would do. It’s nearly impossible to brood while gaming. Go ahead, try it. See? Impossible.

That said, because of all the years I had wasted on brooding and trying to read very large books that I didn’t enjoy, I was well into my 20s when I dialed the Nintendo hotline most frequently, making me without a doubt the oldest regular caller to the Nintendo hotline.

Here is how it worked: The phone would ring a few times. I imagined a phone ringing in a giant castle. The symbolism of calling Nintendo was not lost on me. Nintendo was this amorphous fantasy place in my mind. It was like Santa’s workshop, only it was real. The fact that I was doing something so tangible as calling Nintendo was an exciting act. It was almost as exciting as calling 1-900-U-GETOFF1.

A jolly pre-recorded voice would say, “Kids! Be sure you’ve got your parents’ permission before we connect you with one of our Nintendo Game Counselors!” My face would always get hot with shame when I heard this.

I’d wait on hold for a few seconds, listening to some semi-obscure Nintendo tune playing in the background, like the theme music from World 4 in Super Mario Bros. 3. As far as I was concerned, this was the greatest on-hold music that I’d ever heard.

Eventually, a very chipper person would come on the line. “Thank you for calling Nintendo! I’m Greg, your game counselor. What can I help you with today?”

I was teaching literature classes at Syracuse University at the time. I tried to raise my voice an octave or two, trying not to sound too old and creepy on the phone. “Hi Greg! I’m having trouble finding the seventh Cucco for the lady in Kakariko Village. Can you help me?”

At this point Greg would ask me a series of questions. (I will make up some questions here for conversation’s sake; do not email me about there not being a “Horn of Triumph” in Ocarina. Please. Thank you.) “Do you have the Ocarina of Woe? What about the Boomerang of Fate? And the Moon Medallion? And the Gravity Boots? What about the Horn of Triumph?” (Yes. Yes. No. Yes. No.)

This was usually the point in the call when I would hear the whooshing sound of my Serious Person rushing past me on its way to throwing itself out my apartment window, down to its certain death in the street below.

I had no idea where Greg was getting these answers from. At the time, I imagined him sitting in front of a wall of televisions. Row 2, TV 4 would have Ocarina cued up on it. I imagined him playing five or six games simultaneously. Now I realize he was probably sitting in front of a row of loose-leaf binders. He pulled out the Ocarina binder, flipped to Kakariko Village, then relayed the information to me.

Still, I romanticized Greg’s job to an absurd extreme. Here was a man who knew things. Here was a man with answers. Here was a man who was earning a paycheck for being good at videogames. I imagined him sitting in the Nintendo Castle Cafeteria and eating his lunch, and joking with Shigeru Miyamoto about the fact that THEY WERE SERVING MUSHROOMS AGAIN. (Oh no, not again! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.)

I probably dialed the Nintendo number a dozen times over the years. Each time I spoke with someone with a name like Greg, or Tom, or Mike or Gary. They all sounded like the same person to me. One time I got a Tina. By the end of the call I was basically ready to ask her to marry me. Tina and I discussed the nuances of Super Metroid together. I am telling you, this was far more erotic for me than anything that I ever got from the 1-900 sex-talk numbers. And Tina didn’t slur her words, and didn’t pause after every other sentence to take a pull from her Smirnoff wine cooler. Tina was friendly and smart and very helpful. And she was a girl who could talk about games. Back in the ’90s, there weren’t many of them around.

During one of the final times that I called the Nintendo number, before I got into the habit of visiting GameFAQs.com, I tried to strike up a more personal conversation with Greg. (Or maybe it was Mike. Or maybe Gary.)

“You know, I’ve always wanted a job in videogames,” I confided in GregMikeGary. I lowered my voice, and nervously looked over my shoulder, expecting Serious Person to creep up behind me and bludgeon me with a frying pan. This was, I knew, the ultimate betrayal of Serious Person.

I wanted GregMikeGary to tell me the secret. At that time in the industry, it still felt very much like a secret. Was there a password? A special handshake? A giant, golden key that I needed to find, like the one you use in Ocarina to open the last door in the dungeon? I was desperate. I sat in my tiny apartment on Genesee Street. Snow was falling outside my kitchen window. I listened as if the universe was about to reveal its greatest mysteries to me.

“Nintendo is a great place to work and everyone is really friendly here!” GregMikeGary said, to my great disappointment. Then he asked if there was anything else he could help me with. I considered asking him what Tina was like in real life. But then I made my peace with the fact that no mysteries were going to be revealed here. The mystery of the game industry was going to remain a mystery to me, at least for a few more years. I hung up the phone.

September 1, 2010 scottcjones 7Comments

>For three days last weekend, Vic and I walked around Toronto’s Fan Expo kissing babies, hugging Wonder Womans–hello again, Wonder Womans–and having our pictures taken with strangers. It was incredibly flattering. We shoot the show in a vacuum, not knowing if anyone really watches.

People in Toronto? They watch. Oh, how they watch.

We flew home on Sunday night. I cabbed from the airport. I walked in the door of my apartment, and before I even had a chance to put my suitcase down, one of my cats barfed all over the place.
Then both cats kind of sat there, looking at me with little cat smiles on their little cat faces, as if to say, “Don’t let your head get too big. At the end of the day, you still have to clean up our barf.”
And clean it up I did while the cats sat off to the side, supervising the whole operation. “You missed a spot, Barf Boy,” I imagined one of them saying. “That’s right. You are our Barf Boy. Don’t ever forget that. Barf Boy.”
I love my cats. Vic has a cat too–this orange behemoth named Clyde. And my friend John Teti, he recently transformed into a full blown cat man. Most of the game writer-types I know have cats. Cats and videogame people, for some reason, go great together. Teti recently emailed me a picture of himself playing games while one of his cats–I don’t know if it was Soupy or Nipsy–was sprawled out in his lap and napping as hard as a cat can nap.
Scientific fact: Cats experience an overwhelming urge to get into any/all laps of anyone who is playing a videogame. They seem to have a special sense that tells them whenever people are in a really tough part of the game–perhaps a boss fight–and things are heating up, and they are in dire need of all of their gaming powers. That’s usually when my cat, Bee, decides that it’s time for her to get into my lap and do a few cat circles, then proceed to start kneading my belly/crotch region with her claws.
Sometimes I shoo her away. But mostly I yell “BEE!” followed by a “COME ON!” and then I just let her do what she wants to do. I can’t say no to her and her cute face and soft fur and her green eyes. So I try to game around her, leaning left and right while she does her cat thing as I shout more BEEs and more COME ONs.
Scientific Fact #2: Cats enjoy getting tangled up in cords and climbing on top of gaming consoles when they are on. Bee does this all the time. I’m guessing she enjoys the heat they give off. Whenever I find her on top of the Xbox 360 while I am gaming, I have about 67 heart attacks, because I am sure that a cat-on-top-of-console situation is no doubt responsible for approximately 88-percent of all Red Rings.
Ah, cats.
Jesus.
When I moved to Vancouver, I purchased a new couch for $2000. What a damn fool I was. I haven’t even paid off the damn thing yet, and already my cats have scratched it to hell and back. I’ve tried everything to keep them from scratching the couch–doubled-side tape, blankets arranged so they obscure the most desirable scratch regions (the arms and sides). I’ve shouted COME ONs until I’m practically hoarse. Nothing works. Cat-owner Pro Tip: Don’t buy expensive furniture, because your cats will just barf all over it and scratch the stuffing out of it.
I went to the Yaletown pet store the other day and bought a cardboard scratch thing called a COSMIC CATNIP ALPINE SCRATCHER. It’s basically a $27 wedge of corrugated cardboard that stands at a 45-degree angle.
The cats like it well enough. They climb aboard the Alpine Scratcher and get some good scratches in, so I suppose it’s doing its job. They haven’t neglected the couch arms completely, though. The most interesting part about the Alpine Scratcher is the artwork on the side of the box. It features a bipedal cat wearing lederhosen and suspenders and a jaunty kerchief. Behind him are two smaller, completely naked cats, both of whom are wielding work tools of some sort. The smaller cat on the left gives a wave, as if he’s posing for a wish-you-were-here vacation photo. The one on the right seems less in the mood to be photographed, and more focused on the task at hand. (See the photograph above.)
Next to this trio of cats is a pile of rocks that I can only assume is the grave of one of their alpine climbing companions who didn’t have a strong enough constitution to survive their treacherous ascent. The three cats–the clothed one is the leader; the smaller, nude ones are the cat sherpas–paused to bury their now-dead friend beneath this rock mound, and pay their respects, as if to say, Rest in peace, cat climbing companion. May this rock pyramid we have arranged with our non-descript work tools stand tall in your memory.
August 22, 2010 scottcjones 6Comments

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[Note: This is a post that I wrote a few years back for my now-defunct old blog. It’s not for kids. So, if you are a kid GO AWAY. DON’T READ THIS. GO DO SOMETHING WHOLESOME. SUGGESTION: EAT A SLICE OF WONDER BREAD WHILE READING THE BIBLE. Are all the kids gone? OK, good. Now, fasten your seatbelts, folks. It’s going to be a bumpy night. -jones]

I was in Orlando recently for a videogame-related event. They booked me in cavernous Sheraton situated in an industrial park. Rain fell constantly, blurring the view from my room of the parking lot.

I went downstairs to look for something to eat. The girl in Guest Services informed me that the hotel’s restaurant was closed at the moment. “Is there anything close by?” I asked.

“Applebees,” she said. A pink barrette pinned her hair behind her left ear. “Across the street.” I peered through the glass doors. There, in the distance, through the drizzle, I could see the neon Applebees sign.

Between me and the Applebees stood six lanes of traffic. People in Florida always drive like maniacs. I noticed that there was no concrete oasis in the middle of the road. I’d surely be killed out there.

Lightning flashed. Rain came down harder. It was only four o’clock in the afternoon, but already the parking lot lights were on.

I went back to my room and decided to take a nap while waiting for the hotel restaurant to open for dinner. Not feeling especially sleepy, I turned on the television. And, naturally, this led me to peruse the hotel’s selection of adult channels.

It’s truly amazing the amount of pornography that hotels have now. Twenty years ago, people had to drive to creepy ADULT WORLD-type places to watch a scratchy film loop inside a dark, not to mention beyond unsanitary, bleach-soaked booth to get a little titillation. Now, press two or three buttons on your hotel room’s remote, and boom, you’ve got hardcore.

As the British say: Brilliant.

I scrolled through the countless pages, noting the abundance of titles that featured the word “secretary” in them. Secretary Nights. Secret Secretary Sex. Sexy Secretaries: Unleashed. Secretary Hardcore Hotties. Asian Secretary Sluts of the Orient. Honey, I Banged My Secretary!

I settled on a movie called The Best Of Secret Secretary Sex. When in doubt, always go with a “best of.” That’s my motto. Or, rather, one of my many mottos. I hit the big green ORDER button on the remote. A warning appeared on the television: ONCE YOU PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT YOUR ROOM WILL BE CHARGED WITH THE MOVIE AND THERE ARE ABSOLUTELY NO REFUNDS.

Thunder rumbled overhead. I hit the OK button, agreeing to spend the exorbitant price of $19.95 for a movie that was, at most, 70 minutes long. And of those 70 minutes, if history has taught me anything, I would most likely only need about four of them. Which, if you do the math, averages out to be about $5 per minute.

Music started coming out of the TV’s speakers. Nothing gets men in the mood quite like the dulcet sounds of a Casio keyboard coupled with a braying saxophone. A picture appeared on screen, but it was all scrambled and blurry. I thought I saw part of a leg. Then a fish-net stocking. But then it vanished. “Mr. Johnson’s office,” a woman’s voice said. “I’m sorry, he can’t take your call right now. He’s in meetings all morning. Call back later. Bye.”

“Ms. Cox,” a man’s voice said. “Would you come into my office please?” A wristwatch. A phone. Another leg. Something was clearly wrong here. I got up and shuffled over to the TV. I peered at the back of the TV. I pressed a few of the buttons.

I sat on the end of the bed, fuming, still watching the $19.95 jarbled-up porno I’d just purchased. This is just great, I thought. Lightning flashed outside.

I spent about five minutes fuming, hoping the TV picture would miraculously clear up. Then I realized something: This porno, hell, the whole porno-ordering system, might have been broken for months, or even years. People would gladly take the $20 loss in the name of preserving their dignity. I mean, what kind of person would actually call the front desk to complain that their porno is not working properly?

I’ll tell you what kind of person.
Me. I’m that kind of person. What do they think I’m up here doing anyway? Knitting prayer rugs? I thought. I picked up the phone and dialed.
“Guest services,” a voice said. It was the girl with the pink barrette.

“Hi,” I said, suddenly feeling nervous. “I just ordered a movie? Here, in my room? And it’s not working?”

Silence. Keystrokes on a keyboard. “What exactly is wrong with the movie, Mr. Jones?” the woman asked.

“It’s jarbled,” I said.

“It’s what?”

“It’s jarbled up. I can’t see what’s going on. On the screen. There’s no picture. I mean, there’s a picture, but it’s scrambled.”

More keystrokes. Silence. I imagined the words THE BEST OF SECRET SECRETARY SEX appearing on her monitor in big, flashing letters. “Well,” she said. “Everything looks fine down here. Why don’t you cancel out of that particular movie. And then reorder it. If you’re still having problems, let us know.”

I thanked her and hung up.

Cancel button. Back out to the main menu. Back into the porno menu. The Best Of Secret Secretary Sex. ORDER. Warning. Music. Dialogue.

And once again: the dreaded jarbled-up picture. I stared at the phone. Well, I’ve carried things this far, I thought. I suppose I have to see this through to the end now.

“Guest services.”

“Hi. I just called a minute ago.”

“Jarbled picture?”

“That’s me. Jarbled picture. I reordered my movie, as you suggested, and it’s still jarbled.”

Silence. Keystrokes. More silence. A sigh. Did I just hear some degree of judgment in that sigh? Because it sounded judgmental to me… “At this point, Mr. Jones,” she said, “all we can do is send up a technician.”

She waited. I was sure that she was sure I’d decline. That I’d cut my losses here. That I’d hang onto whatever tiny shred of dignity I had left.

I thought of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of horny travelers and horny business men who had tried to watch The Best Of Secret Secretary Sex and had gotten duped by this jarbled porno. The fucking buck stops here, I thought.

“Send him up,” I said.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

I looked at the screen. The hem of a skirt. An ankle. A Rolodex. Something hair-covered that could have been a man’s armpit or a crotch. “Oh yeah. I’m sure. Send him.”

About 45 minutes later there was a polite tap on the door. “Maintenance!” a voice shouted.

I opened the door. A bald black man with a massive keyring on his belt carried a toolbox into the room. He set it down on the bed. “I’m in room 237 now, over,” he said into a walkie-talkie. “What’s the problem?”

I pointed at the TV. A wrist. A necklace. A woman’s mouth. The back of a hand. “I’ve got sound, but no picture,” I said.

The man put his hands on his hips. He furrowed his brow. “Hmm,” he said. “Quit out of this movie. Go to another one. Let’s see if you get the same problem. Could just be a bad movie in the system.”

I fumbled with the remote. I felt awkward having this stranger in my space. I wished I’d picked up a little, put some of my personal things away. Stray sections from USA Today were scattered around the toilet. My suitcase was on the bed, opened, my Hanes on display.

Cancel button. Main menu. Porno menu. I started aimlessly scrolling through the titles. Secretary Ass Fest. My Secretary Loves Cock. Cocked-Up Secretaries From Barcelona. I could hear the man breathing through his nose. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Rain pounded against the room’s air conditioning unit.

I thought: Do I just pick anything? Or, do I pick something that I want to actually watch? I scrolled through the list, faster and faster, picking up speed. Finally, as if reading my mind, the man sighed then said, “Just pick something. Anything. It doesn’t matter. We just need to see if it’s the one movie, or if it’s all the movies.”

I landed on something called Secretaries In Da Hood. The WARNING screen came up.

“Now hit the ‘OK’ button,” the man said.

I did.

Sound came from the TV. And then, miraculously, a picture appeared. A light-skinned black girl was on her knees fellating a man with a penis the size of a six-dollar hoagie. The Sheraton maintenance man and I stood there together, watching the TV screen.

Inhale. Exhale.

“Well,” the man finally said, “it sure looks like it’s working now.” He grabbed his toolbox. Then he said something unintelligible into his walkie-talkie. He headed towards the door.

“So I guess that other one was a bad movie?” I said.

“I guess so,” he said.

“You know, it could have been out of order for a long time,” I said. I thought of all those business men before me. My brothers! I’m making a stand for you!

“It could have been,” the man said. “Who knows, really.”

He stopped in the doorway. He looked back at the TV. “Look, don’t worry about the movie,” the man said. “I’ll tell them downstairs to take it off your bill.”

I thanked him, then shut the door.

I stood in the room’s entryway, listening hard, my ears straining for the slightest sound. I could hear the hum of the hotel around me. The cooling systems. The vents. The inner workings. The elevators going up and down.

I was listening for something beyond the hotel’s machinery, listening for something human. A judgmental snicker maybe, or even a chorus of judgmental snickers. Or maybe a bark of laughter as the maintenance man told his maintenance buddies about the call he’d just responded to. I stood there, listening as hard as I’ve ever listened.

And I heard nothing.

Then I thought, Man, what do I fucking care. Fuck Orlando. Fuck Florida. Fuck these people.

I drew the blinds and enjoyed four utterly delightful minutes of a fine piece of cinema known as Secretaries In Da Hood.

August 19, 2010 scottcjones 2Comments

>So Mafia II is mere days away from completely turning the game world upside down with its GTA IV gameplay and Heavy Rain-caliber cutscenes.

Or, so 2K hopes.

Is it great? Is it terrible? Am I even playing it? Forgive my coyness, but 2K has issued a blanket, industry-wide gag order. Anyone who is actually playing the game–and, presumably, many writers are–isn’t allowed to even Tweet that they are playing the game. Or else unholy 2K-style hell shall rain down upon them.
So, in the name of keeping the hell-rain at bay, I’ll cop to playing the Mafia II demo, which is freely available on XBL and PSN. Go download it, if you haven’t already.
My main qualm with the Mafia II demo is the handling of the old-time cars. I realize that this is a period piece set in the late ’40s and ’50s. I realize that a great many talented people were paid a great deal of money to create a hyper-detailed version of a ’40s-’50s era metropolis. Everything in the game, from the wardrobe to the fonts on the street signs, feels considered and crafted. The result: a credible, convincing, and totally impressive gameplay world that can only be navigated in two ways: on foot, or in one of the game’s incredibly heavy, lumbering, slow-moving Happy Days-like cars.
The few cars that I’ve driven so far in the demo are slow to accelerate. How slow exactly? This is how slow: I could boil an egg in the time it takes for my car to achieve top speed. And once I did achieve full speed, it’s not uncommon to see NPC’s on the sidewalks out-pacing me.
And forget about stopping. Hit the brakes now, and you’ll likely come to a stop several, skid-marked blocks beyond your intended destination.
Turning is another adventure unto itself. Most cars in the game feature wider turning radii than a three-wheeled shopping cart.
All of which is to say that driving around Empire City–at least from what I’ve seen in the demo–is a stop-and-go, ass-pain-ish chore. Is it authentic? Oh, yes. It is true to the period? Oh, absolutely. But is it fun to drive around a car that feels like a 4,000 pound steel box that handles like its wheels are made out of old banana peels?
It is not.
This is the same problem I had with Pandemic’s The Saboteur. Yes, eventually I was able to access better, slicker rides later in the game–presumably this will also be the case with Mafia II (I wouldn’t know because I AM ONLY PLAYING THE DEMO)–but The Saboteur’s first third forced me to navigate Nazi-occupied Paris in a rooty-toot-toot, 23-skiddoo, ah-oogah, ah-oogah, old-time car. I didn’t feel like a professional race-car driver on the cusp of turning into a James Bond-ian spy. Instead, I felt like I was auditioning for a roll in a remake of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Was it fun?
It was not.
Maybe part of the problem is that I could not give one shit about cars. I remember, in high school, friends of mine poring over car magazines, studying the glossy pictures of Corvettes and shit. I didn’t get it. I still don’t. A few weeks ago, when I was on the East Coast visiting my family, we went for a walk after dinner one night in Sylvan Beach, New York, and stumbled across an old-time car show. Hoods were popped open on all these roadsters, with men gathered around, peering into their dark workings.
I honestly can’t imagine a more dull scene than this one.
And whenever a wealthy colleague of mine, or someone in the business, purchases an expensive car–cough, cough, Cliffy B., cough–my response is always the same: “You dope.” Blame it on the fact that I haven’t actually owned a car in nearly 15 years now–the New York subway worked fine; and in Vancouver, I can walk everywhere–but purchasing something that, as soon as you drive it off the lot depreciates in value nearly 50-percent, does not sound like a wise investment to me.
Man, I’m all for period pieces, and realism, and verisimilitude in videogames. But I’m against all of these things–100-percent, across the board against these things–if they come at the expense of gameplay. This is a fiction, people. Poetic license and creative liberties are not only O.K. in videogames; they’re encouraged. They’re absolutely essential to creating a compelling entertainment.
So, in Mafia III, please let me drive it like I stole it. Because, most of the time, in Mafia II, even though I did actually steal it, I’m driving it like I’m taking my grandmother to her podiatrist.
NOTE: In the name of full disclosure, the premise for this post was born out of a very pleasant phone conversation that I had with my colleague John Teti. SO THERE’S YOUR POUND OF FLESH, JOHN. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT, MAN??????
August 17, 2010 scottcjones 7Comments

>I was at a BBQ at Vic’s place last Sunday afternoon–the incomparable Ryan Payton was in town visiting, and we were grilling salmon steaks in the name of feting him–when the topic of conversation suddenly turned to spiders.

Confession: I am no fan of spiders. Snakes? Fine. Heights? No problem. But spiders? You can keep your damn spiders, thanks.
“You should have seen the one that I killed this morning,” Vic said. “It was right there.” He pointed his spatula at the corner of a free-standing umbrella, just above our heads. “I knocked it to the ground. It was one of those mean spiders. It coiled up. Like it was ready to come at me.”
Naturally, the question for me in this moment, without fail, is always the same: “How big was it?” I asked.
Vic made a circle with his forefinger and thumb. Much to my chagrin, his finger and thumb did not touch. Whatever hellspawn demon spider this was, it was larger than the span of Vic’s finger-thumb circle.
“JESUS,” I said. I started involuntarily brushing invisible things off my arms and legs and neck like a crazy person. (If you watch Reviews regularly, and you’ve got a quick eye, you can often see me swatting away non-existant bugs.)
Another guest at the BBQ overheard our spider story and weighed in with one of his own. “I remember going down into the basement in our old house a few years back,” he said. “And I spotted this huge, black spider scuttling across the floor. I grabbed the closest weapon–in this case, it happened to be an old hockey stick–and went after it.”
“JESUS,” I said.
“I hacked at it a few times, but it just kept going. It was faster and tougher than I thought it would be. And though I’d landed several solid blows and wounded it, the thing still got away.”
“JESUS.”
“I never saw it again. I always wondered where it went. I pictured it down there, healing in our basement, one of its legs in a tiny cast, plotting its revenge on me. Then, about a year later, we were moving out of the house. I pulled an old sofa away from the wall, and there it was. Dead. Upside down. Its corpse was huge.”
“JESUS.”
“I went, ‘Ha, ha! So that’s where you went, you little bastard! Ha, ha, ha, ha!”
“So. How big was it?”
He held up his hand, fingers splayed as wide they would splay. “It was probably just slightly smaller than my hand,” he said.
“OH, COME ON,” I said.
“Trust me, it was big,” he said.
Again I started swatting at the non-existant bugs that were crawling on me. Goddamn invisible bugs!
Finally, a third guest at the BBQ overheard us and weighed in with his story. “When my girlfriend and I were moving out of our old place, I went down to our storage unit to get our things. I saw something moving around in the shadows and when I looked closer, I saw that it was this huge spider.”
“JESUS.”
“I’d never seen a spider like this around here before. It was a frigging tarantula. It had these thick legs and this fat body and hair all over it.”
“So what did you do? Did you kill it?” I asked.
“No. I just grabbed my boxes and got the hell out of there.”
“THAT MEANS THAT IT IS STILL ROAMING THE EARTH,” I said. I was beside myself with worry now. No one told me, before moving to the Pacific Northwest that this was THE LAND OF THE GIANT SPIDERS. Nobody warned me. If someone had informed me of this before I moved here, I might have reconsidered. We have cockroaches and waterbugs–and yes, large rats with pink tails–in New York City. But the spiders, if you do see any in NYC, are usually only modestly sized. Before I travel anywhere for a vacation, I always do some research, to get some idea of the size of the local spiders. If they are above a certain size–bigger than a silver dollar or so–THAT DESTINATION IS OFF. (South America, for example = OFF.) I had some friends who honeymooned in the south of France about 10 years ago. They stayed in an old manor house, with high-beamed ceilings and stone walls. It sounded like just about the perfect place to honeymoon–roaring fire, red wine, blah, blah, blah–until they discovered A MAMMOTH SPIDER in the room. They covered it with a shoebox, and then mummified themselves inside their blankets for the night and didn’t sleep a wink that night. (South of France = OFF.)
Yesterday I was playing Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light on the 360 when I received a new objective: ENTER THE SPIDER TOMB.
“OH COME ON,” I said out loud, even though it was just me and the cats in my apartment. No sooner had I opened the door to the Spider Tomb than a horde of spiders the size of German shepherds came rushing out to greet me.
Spiders are one of the most ubiquitous enemies in all of gaming, second only to zombies. Almost every videogame ever made features a fight at some point with a spider, or spider-type creature. Here are a couple off the top of my head: Brutal Legend (heavy metal spider), the entire Resident Evil series, Devil May Cry, all MMOs, Doom II, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of T., Earth Defense Force 2017, Ghostbusters: The V.G., Overlord II, Bomberman 64, Darksiders, and Spider Fighter for the 2600.
I stepped inside the Spider Tomb–which is far more intimidating-sounding than “Spider Picnic Area” or “Spider Wild Times Fun Park”–and, naturally, there were webs EVERYWHERE. Suddenly, more of the German Shepherd-sized spiders came galloping out. After I dispatched them, a second horde arrived. Fine. Then a third horde. Fine, again. In the middle of the third horde AN EVEN LARGER SPIDER APPEARS. (JESUS.)
I traveled deeper into the Tomb, and things got worse when a BEHEMOTH spider appeared. I have a 42-inch HDTV, and this thing practically filled up the entirety of it. It was so hairy that it appeared to be wearing a $16.99 JCPenny Mohair sweater.
But what I feel when I play through spider levels of games is not fear, or anxiety. I’m not literally afraid of these virtual spiders. Mostly what I was yesterday while playing through the Spider Tomb was really fucking annoyed. I was annoyed with the lack of creativity on the developers part for yet again trying to draw water from a well–call it The Spider Well–that has long gone dry. Using spiders as enemies is cheap and unimaginative.
Think about it: a bunch of Mohair sweater-wearing game designers are sitting around a table at the Crystal Dynamics offices, brainstorming their way towards a new Tomb Raider game, when, glory be, one guy says, “Eureka, I have it! People have an irrational fear of spiders. Let’s USE THAT TO OUR ADVANTAGE. Let’s play off of their irrational fear! LET’S BUILD AN ENTIRE LEVEL CENTERED AROUND SPIDERS. That will really give gamers a jolt! Ha, ha!”
A second guy says: “And let’s put all of those spiders…IN A TOMB.”
A third guy says: “HOLY CRAP, THAT’S IT.”
Fourth guy: “I can’t believe how wildly inventive we are!” (Rampant back-slapping and high-fiving ensues.)
I’m a zombie fan, and an exploding-barrel fan. I will argue passionately for both zombies and exploding barrels to be integral elements of videogames until the day I die. But Mr. Spider: The sun has set on you. Yes, tales of your exploits will continue to cause me to involuntarily say the word “JESUS.” But your presence in videogames is no longer required. Good day, sir.
August 11, 2010 scottcjones 5Comments

>At this point in my life I see my parents twice year: Once in the summer, once at Christmas. Last week, I endured the once-per-summer visit back East, to rural Upstate New York.

My father, now in his ’60s, has never used a computer in his life. He does not have an email address. He claims, rather defensively, to have no interest in such things. When it comes to technology, me thinks my dad doth protest too much sometimes. There has always been a vast divide between my interests and his. I pride myself on being different from him, and vice versa.
Computers and books and Star Wars were always my thing. Chain saws and cheese and feats of strength were his things.
My mom, however, has managed to achieve a low level of computer savvy over the last few years. She’s got a laptop–my old one–and a Verizon broadband card, which I pay for. No, I am not running for Son of the Year, but I probably should be.
When I was a kid, whenever my mom was on the telephone for longer than 10 minutes, my dad would begin shouting, “GET OFF THE GODDAMN PHONE.” Now, here in the future, it’s the computer that he yells about.
“Where’s mom?” I asked him last week.
“I don’t know. She’s probably in there ON THE GODDAMN COMPUTER AGAIN,” he said.
My mother likes her email. Much to my relief, she has finally evolved beyond her forwarding phase. She no longer forwards inspirational junk mail–REACH FOR THE STARS!!!!!!!!–or my uncle’s dumb jokes emails, or spam. And she’s on Facebook now, which was basically the final nail in the Facebook coffin for me. Ever since she spotted me online one day and decided to ambush me with an instant message–HELLO SCOTT IT’S YOUR MOTHER–I’ve avoided the site. No matter. Facebook was kind of on the way out for me anyway. My mother just hurried it along a little.
What I realized on this most recent visit home, is that my mom, more than Facebook or email, loves videogames. She constantly seems to have a browser window open that’s connected to Bookworm, or some variation of a match-three, Bejeweled-type game.
As you might imagine, I don’t mind seeing this.
A week or so before I was due to fly home, my mom phoned and asked if I’d be willing to part with one of my Nintendo DSes. I currently have three DSes with me in Vancouver–a second generation DS complete with GBA slot, a DSi (black), and a DSi XL (maroon). And I’ve got at least two–or maybe three; I’ve honestly lost count–DSes back in New York.
Not only could I afford to part with one–or two, or three–I was, sort of surprisingly, looking forward to giving my mom a DS.
My parents don’t really understand what I do for a living, or why I do it. They know that I have food and shelter, and that I can provide for myself, and that I seem reasonably happy. Beyond that, my affinity for videogames and nerd stuff seems to baffle them.
But when she asked for the DS, I thought, My mom gets it. She sees the value in videogames, a least in some small way, and by association, maybe she sees the value in what I do for a living. The prospect of finally being somewhat understood, at least by one of my parents, was really exciting to me.
So I gave her a DS–the DSi XL, specifically, since it’s so big that I rarely take it anywhere with me anyway. I loaded up some games on it for her–her beloved Bookworm, and Bejeweled 2, and I threw in Aura-Aura Climber, just for the hell of it. I bought her a 4 GB SD card at Wal-mart, and showed her how to take photos. I also bought Wedding Dash, a Diner Dash variation, which I thought she might enjoy.
At one point during my visit home I spotted her actually reading the tiny instruction booklet for Wedding Dash, trying to figure out how to play the game. She looked so earnest, peering at the tiny font in the tiny booklet. It broke my heart a little, honestly.
The days are kind of long and lazy when I go home. My parents can’t wait for me to get there, but once I arrive, we all sort of sit around and look at one another, wondering what to do. One afternoon, out of boredom, we went for a drive to buy a soft ice cream. My mom insisted on me sitting in the front passenger seat. She chose to sit in the back behind my father, who was driving. As we sped down Route 13, I noticed that she had her DSi XL out. She was quietly tapping at the screen, working her way through another level of Bookworm.
“How is that version of Bookworm?” I turned and asked.
She looked up from her game, alarmed. She shook her head. She pointed at the back of my dad’s head and made a shushing motion. I realized that the reason she was sitting in the back seat was so that she could get a little gaming time in, without having my father complain about it.
The three of us rode along in silence–my dad peering at the roadway, my mom playing Bookworm in the back seat, and me, aware of what my mom was doing, but feeling more than happy to comply with her wish to sneak in a few minutes of private game time.
All of which leads me to suspect that I might have inherited more from my mother’s side of the family than just my giant, lumbering frame and my round head.
August 2, 2010 scottcjones 7Comments

>

I’m on vacation this week. Sort of on vacation. I’m going East to visit my family for a few days. Which, I don’t expect, will be terribly relaxing. (It never is.) We always drive all over the place, visiting a million relatives. And my parents yell at each other. And I sit in the backseat and completely regress. My dad is having trouble seeing out of one of his eyes these days–his name is Bob; and I’ve started referring to him as “Bobclops”–which should make riding around with him driving A LOT more exciting than it normally is.
Whenever I have a few days to play what I want to play–as opposed to playing stuff that I have to review for work–I almost always take on a gaming project. A gaming project is when you pick one game and focus only on that game for the duration of your vacation time. Example: Over the Holidays a couple years back, I worked my way through Shadow of the Colossus in its entirety, defeating one colossus per day.
It was not unpleasant.
Gaming projects are a good way to fill in gaps in my gaming resume. Usually what I do is this: I pick a vintage game that I’ve been meaning to finish, but never quite got around to finishing. Mostly, it’s just a good excuse to go back and appreciate the old crap.
Ah, old crap.
On Friday, late in the afternoon, Vic came into the office–he’s off too this week–and announced that he was planning to get every last star in Super Mario Galaxy 2. Which surprised me, because I thought the whole “gaming project” thing was unique to me. Apparently, other people do these gaming projects too.
Or maybe it’s just Vic. Who knows.
Over the weekend, while contemplating what my gaming project was going to be, I popped in the 360 version of Clash of the Titans. I was kind of excited for it. I enjoyed the movie far more than I thought I would. And I do love my God of War knock-offs. So the game had a lot going for it. Plus: The PR company who sent me the game also saw fit to include the Clash of the T.’s Blu-ray.
Good will = generated.
The game was originally supposed to come out when the movie was in theaters. But at the last minute, it was delayed. Which I read as a good sign. They realized the game needed more work, so they held onto it and decided to work on it some more. I’m always OK with that. I wish more publishers would make these kinds of executive decisions. There would be a lot less crap/junk in the world.
Clash of the Titans: The Videogame blows. It blows about as much as anything I have ever played in my life. I can’t even describe how terrible it is. I can’t believe that the WB and Namco would even bother to lay this big, damp turd of a game on the world. Poor world!!!!!
I played for about an hour before taking the disc out of the 360, boxing it up, then literally hurling it across my living room. (My living room is small, so the game didn’t have very far to travel.)
What total and complete shit. And Sam Worthington looks like Sloth from The Goonies for some inexplicable reason. (Durrrrrrrrrrrrr! Durrrrrrrr, durrrrrrrr!!!)
QUESTION: HOW DO YOU FUCK UP A GAME ABOUT FIGHTING GIANT MONSTERS WITH GIANT SWORDS?
ANSWER: THIS IS HOW.
As the English would say: What rubbish!
This game is so bad that it has, as an unfortunate side effect, retroactively diminished my opinion of the movie. Fuck this movie. I never want to see this movie again. And Liam Neeson: The Allman Brothers phoned. They want their wig back.
So.
Back to my gaming project I went.
I’ve been meaning to get around to The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask for awhile now. I’ve been thinking about the game a lot for some reason. I’ve decided that this is my week to get it done. I sank about 4-5 hours into Majora’s yesterday.
I go back and forth on Zelda as a franchise. Twilight Princess bored me. I tried to finish it TWICE. Both times I got so bored that I quit. Wind Waker was boring too. All that fucking sailing! And the ending just went on forever. (What do you mean I have to RE-FIGHT all the bosses again? What??????)
But A Link to the Past is ONE OF THE GREATEST GAMING MOMENTS OF MY LIFE. Man, I will never forget sitting in my tiny apartment in Chicago, eat gyros from the Greek place across the street, and playing through that game. I just loved it so much.
So Zelda: You will forever have a place in my heart, no matter how many boring games in a row Nintendo makes.
Majora’s Mask always interested me because it seemed like such a dark, dirty little diversion when compared to the other games in the series. And man, is it ever dark! That weird cackling mask dealer in the clock tower! The Skull Kid and his weird dances! The grimacing red moon, looking like the creepy moon-face in the George Melies’ 1902 movie.
It’s all so strange and morbid. And great.
Beyond great.
Again, I’m left wondering why we even need these high-powered machines like the PS3 and 360. Man, we do not need all that power! We do not need more realism, and more pixels and more polygons.
We don’t.
This game manages to be both silly and profound. It’s almost 11 years old–it came out, appropriately enough, just before Halloween in 2000–so it looks crude by today’s Modern Warfare 2 standards. Yet it somehow, someway manages to evoke a sense of wonder and mystery that is pretty much unmatched by almost anything I’ve played recently. Playing the game is akin to having a lucid dream. Everything seems familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It’s so strange.
And great.
Did I mention that it’s great?
Well. It is.
There are a couple of scarecrows who I’ve encountered on my journey so far. Or maybe it’s the same scarecrow who continues to pop up in different places through out the game. Either way, The scarecrow(s) always offer(s) to do a dance that will fast-forward time 12 hours, if that’s what I want him to do.
The scarecrow dance–the flailing arms! all the swaying!–makes me cringe every time I see it. It seems to go on far longer than it needs to. Yet I can’t look away! I try, but I can’t! Watch it for yourself. You’ll see what I mean.
There are so many moments like this in Majora’s Mask; moments that I react to, that I have an emotional response to, whether I want to or not. The weird jugglers in town who make the terrible joke about the kidnapping (the punchline: a “kid” was “napping”). The odd mask-wearing creature who disappears behind the Curiosity Shop door just before I can reach him. The old astronomer up in the tower, talking about Moon Tears. It always feels like the whole game is teetering on the edge of poor taste. It flirts with poor taste, then pulls back at the last second. It has this weird, discomforting menace.
These moments resonate long after I shut the game off. There’s poetry and art in these moments. Real poetry. Real art.
These moments are far too rare in videogames. Far too rare.
I’ll keep you posted on my Majora’s Mask progress, just as soon as I make more. Stay tuned.
July 28, 2010 scottcjones 17Comments

>Yesterday Vic and I locked ourselves in the production office and attempted to plow through as much StarCraft II as we possibly could in the name of shooting a review sometime in the near future.

Blizzard worked on this damn thing since 2003, and here I was trying to choke the whole thing down in a day or two. It’s one of the unfortunate aspects of my otherwise really, really–and I mean really–great job. In the name of being timely, sometimes there’s just no time to take your time and savor experiences.
And we’re not the only ones who are consuming StarCraft II in huge, unhealthy chunks. As my friend John Teti poetically put it yesterday: “StarCraft II is making game reviewers everywhere completely miserable right now.” Imagine going to a great restaurant and ordering a huge steak, and then being told that you have four minutes to eat the whole steak and get the fuck out. That’s pretty much what game reviewers are forced to do much of the time.
Around dinner time last night, I thought I’d spin the Canadian Pizza Wheel again. Pizza sounded good to me. I paused my StarCraft II campaign and called up a chain restaurant called Panago. An hour later, a delivery guy arrived. “Are you guys playing StarCraft II?” the delivery guy asked.
“Yes,” I said.
He was visibly invigorated by this information. “Oh MAN,” he said. “Can I have your jobs? HA HA HAHAAAA.”
I was feeling miserable, having just endured a mission-ending base-storming by the Zerg, which meant DO-OVER. I wanted my pizza and I wanted this guy to leave. “We’re professionals,” I said, handing him his change. “So don’t try this at home.”
The guy lingered for a few more moments, until I finally had to shoo him away so I could get back to StarCraft. I ate some of my pizza and braced myself for another Zerg onslaught. “How is your pizza?” Vic asked.
“It’s terrible,” I said. “It tastes like a dog took a shit on some dough.”
We laughed. “It smells good,” he said.
“It’s not good,” I said. Even the most terrible pizza in New York was better than this. If you dug an old piece of pizza out of a garbage can in New York, it would taste about a million times better than this. Man, I missed those oily, salty slices the size of shape of Yield signs at Koronet on 110th Street and Broadway.
Fuck! Now those were slices!
I get the how-do-I-get-your-job question line a lot these days. Everyone in this business does. I get emails every day from people–some half-joking, some dead serious–asking for my job, or advice on how to get my job. I don’t mind giving out advice. I love helping people more than anything in the world. If you really want advice–practical advice–I’ll give it to you. But occasionally, on my worst days–like yesterday–I get cheesed off by these knee-jerk inquiries.
The truth is, you don’t just wake up one day and do what I do. I’m sorry, but you don’t. I went through a lot of shit to get where I am. I had a lot of lean years. Years when I lived below the poverty line. Years when I cast myself into the abyss of E3. I took chances. Shit, I wrote game reviews for free for years, before anyone took me seriously, before anyone paid me one cent to do any of this.
Anyone in this business who has endured took a huge leap of faith at some point and lived to tell about it. Look at Vic. He was an actor waiting tables. He loved videogames. Sixteen years ago, he invested in a camera and some editing equipment and decided to try to talk about games on TV, not knowing 1. if anyone would even broadcast his show, or 2. if anyone would care about anything he said should his show, by some miracle, get on the air.
Vic told me a story about this one guy who emailed him almost daily. He wanted a job in TV production. Finally, tired of the emails and feeling generous, Vic wrote back. “OK, here’s your chance. Show me what you got. Impress me. Send me something cool showing me what you can do.”
The guy wrote back immediately. “YOU WON’T BE DISAPPOINTED!” he said.
A couple of days turned into a week. A couple of weeks became a month. Still no word from the guy.
Finally, one day, an email pops up from him in Vic’s Inbox. “I’m almost finished! I can’t wait to show you what I’ve got! You’re going to love it!”
Vic could have left it at that, and ignored the guy. He didn’t. He gave him another chance. “OK, get it to me ASAP,” he wrote. The company was hiring editors and production people at the time.
“I definitely will!” the guy wrote back.
More days passed. More weeks. More months. Vic forgot about the guy. Until one day another email showed up in his Inbox. “I am almost there FINALLY! Whew! Look for something in the mail soon!” the guy wrote.
But nothing ever arrived in the mail. And Vic never heard from the guy again.
The fact is, a door was opened, very briefly. Here was Vic, giving this guy what he said he so desperately wanted. And the guy, for reasons we will never know or understand, delivered nothing.
I get emails all the time from one cute girl who believes that she is supposed to be on G4 and hosting a show. “I KNOW I WOULD BE GREAT AT IT!!!!!!!!!” she writes. (Almost everyone I know gets emails from this girl.)
Look, it doesn’t matter if you’re a cute girl. Or the best gamer in the world. Or a cute girl who happens to be the best gamer in the world. You want my job? Don’t spam people in the business with emails telling them that you should be on G4 because you think you would be “GREAT AT IT.” Man, do something about it. Prove yourself. Show the world why you should be doing what you want to do. Give the world a fucking reason. Tell yourself that you’re going to do this–you’re going to work in the videogames business in some capacity–no matter what goes down in your life.
No matter what your parents say. No matter what your guidance counselor tells you. No matter how much shit and trash and terrible shit-ass pizza life throws at you.
Do that, and then maybe we’ll talk about you taking my job.
July 24, 2010 scottcjones 3Comments

>I’ve been in San Diego this week, attending my very first Comic Con. I’ve never had any desire to go to Comic Con. I have no urge whatsoever to dress up as anything, or even look at people who are dressed up as anything. I don’t even really want to be around the dress-up people. Some are cool about it, and sort of keep to themselves, and aren’t into flaunting the fact that they are dressed up as Jocko Sinn from Obscure Manga #782. Others, the most terrible ones, embrace their disguises a little too much and run around posing and interacting with other people while in character.

One man wearing orange body paint and paper mache shoulder pads approached me yesterday. He held a greasy section of Plexiglass in front of his face, then squinted at me through it.
“Hmm. This life form does not appear to be registering on my scanner,” he said.
“Please, I beg of you, leave me alone,” I said.
He left me alone. Most of these people are nice about it. Whenever I find myself losing patience with all the play acting and faux sword fights and less-than-epic reenactments of something that’s beyond obscure, I try to remember that many of these people probably have terrible existences that involve god-awful jobs and awful relationships. (Though I did meet one nice man who ruined my ability to stereotype; he appeared to be in his 60’s, and was dressed as a Ghostbuster. He works as a doctor in Indiana and claims to be happily married.)
Who am I to get peeved by the three days out of the year when these people get the chance to do something in public that would under normal circumstances get them chased out of their hometowns by pitchfork-weilding villagers?
So I try really, really hard not to get peeved.
Have your fun. Live it up.
You damn freaks.
In an attempt to embrace the show and make myself a part of Comic Con, I forced myself to shop for, and purchase, two things: 1. a toy of some kind, and 2. some comics.
I made a long list of comics that I was interested in purchasing: Eisner’s A Contract With God, Clowes’ David Boring, Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons!, Spain’s Nightmare Alley, Pekar’s Our Cancer Year, etc.
I brought my list to the biggest shop on the expo floor and handed it to one of the employees. He peered at the list. He peered at the shelves. He peered at the list. Then again at the shelves. List. Shelves. List. Shelves.
After about 10 minutes of searching, of the 12 comics on my list, he’d found only one: Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s it,” he said.
I took my one comic–which is really excellent, by the way–and waded back into the crowd of costumed freaks.
I tried a few more tables, and again came up empty. I sort of understand not being able to find Lynda Barry–man, she’s so great–but Harvey Pekar? The man died a couple weeks ago. And there’s nary a trace of him or his work anywhere at the show.
That just shits.
Instead, there are giant Hulk ads everywhere. There is a Red Hulk now for some reason. There are a least four different kinds of Spider-mans (I don’t know their names; Old, New, Future, and Mega maybe?). There are several kinds of Batmans also being advertised. A gigantic metal Transformer Bumblebee towers over the show floor. There are a handful of Iron Man statues, and the car from The Green Hornet–LOOK IT’S THE FUCKING GREEN HORNET CAR! I CAN’T BELIEVE WHAT I AM SEEING! AIIIIEEEEEEE!–and some sort of rubber alien prop that might or might not have been used to film this or that scene in The Green Hornet.
I get it. Super heroes are cool. They make money. That’s where it’s at. That’s what this is all about.
In an ideal world, a world that catered solely to my wants, needs, and desires, a larger percentage of Comic Con would be devoted to the stuff that I like, and am interested in. But the world is a long, long way from being designed with my needs in mind. Instead, it’s filled with people named Jocko Sinn who don’t mind standing in a four-hour line so that he might be able to stand within a foot of a rubber alien prop and maybe get close enough to Kevin Smith so that he can smell his musk.
Meanwhile, Harvey Pekar’s corpse rots in its grave in Cleveland.
Which is a fucking shame.
As for my toy purchase, I bought a Kenner Star Wars action figure. Old school, baby, all the way. I settled on an old, battered, well-worn, far-from-mint Obi-Wan Kenobi for $8. When I was a kid, my mom took my brother and me to the local store and let us pick out exactly ONE Star Wars action figure each.
My brother, predictably, chose Luke Skywalker. Everyone always chose Luke Skywalker. Whenever my cousins got together to play with their Star Wars figures, it was a fucking Luke Skywalker/Han Solo convention. “Hello, Luke.” “How you’ve been, Luke?” “I’ve been fine, Luke, how have you been?” “Oh, look who’s here. It’s Han.” “Hey, Han, over here!”
It was impossible to recreate scenes from the movie, or cook up any credible fiction, with 10 Lukes and eight Hans.
So I settled on Obi-Wan.
Because nobody had Obi-Wan.
Nobody wanted Obi-wan. And we needed, more than anything, an Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan and I are flying back to Vancouver today.
May the Force be with us.
July 15, 2010 scottcjones 9Comments

>

[Late to the party? Get caught up by starting with Part 1.]
The L.A. Convention Center is a confusing, poorly designed space, especially for a first-time E3 goer. The place is chopped up into several cavernous halls: West Hall, South Hall, and Kentia Hall. The only “hall” I’d ever heard of previous to this was the “mead hall” that Grendel lays waste to in the Old English poem, Beowulf. Ah, 9th grade English class.
To make matters worse, each of these halls is approximately 4.3 miles from the other halls. So, if you get confused and head to the South Hall for an appointment that’s actually in the West Hall, you can forget all about making the West Hall appointment.

I was trying to get the lay of the land in the name of locating the Press Room, where I would, hopefully, acquire an important object known as the press badge. The press badge is the key to E3, only instead of being wrapped in tinfoil and buried under some dirt in a planter, it was buried inside several tons of steel and glass inside the convention center. The Press Room, according to the useless L.A.C.C. map I was peering at, was not located in any of the halls, but in a “Meeting Room” on “Level 2A-1.”

For the second time that day–but far from the final time–I was lost.
As I studied my map like Magellan, certain that I was on the cusp of discovering a lost, game-loving civilization–a civilization that I was sure I was always destined to be a part of–convention-goers milled around me with a great sense of purpose and direction. Almost everyone wore baggy-type khaki shorts and carried giant backpacks. A guy with a mustache walked by talking excitedly into a cellphone. “We need to get the live blog of the Nintendo presser posted NOW, NOW, NOW!” he said.
His trilogy of NOW’s jarred me out of my map-gazing stupor. Live blog? Nintendo presser? What the shit? Not only did this guy have a cell phone, which seemed like an incredible indulgence at the time–like the last passenger on the Titanic, I was still clinging madly to my plug-in-the-wall AT&T home phone–he was speaking a language I did not understand at all.
The guy saw me staring at him as he barked still more important-sounding jargon into his fancy phone. He gave me a dismissive look before he and his dumb mustache strode off into the buzzing throngs.
I was suddenly overwhelmed with self-consciousness. I felt paranoid, as if all of these khaki-shorts-wearing, backpack-carrying people around me knew full well that I had no idea where the fuck I was going or what the fuck I was doing here. I recalled my first days in New York City, when I was constantly certain that I wearing the wrong clothes and doing all the wrong things; clothes and actions that were forever exposing me as some kind of banjo-plucking, jug-band-blowing rube from Upstate New York. (Which I was.) Here I was hemorrhaging cash, riding mysterious blue buses around L.A., looking for sets of keys wrapped in tinfoil, sleeping in some lady’s apartment in Santa Monica who I’d never met before (and at this point, still hadn’t met), looking at unreadable maps. In my head I heard that creepy Mr. Hooper from Sesame Street singing his creepy song, “One of these things is not like the other…”
I put away the shit-ass map and instead started to look at the people around me. I studied them the way that Jane Goodall studied her beloved tick-eating apes. Some people already had badges hanging around their necks; some people did not have badges. I focused on the badge-less. I noticed that they all seemed to be milling towards one particular nearby escalator. I followed these badge-less apes. I rode their escalator. And voila, they led me straight to the Press Room.
While congratulating myself on my display of cleverness, I located the “U.S. Media” line and took my place at the end. When it was finally my turn, I walked up to the attendant, a chubby, gray-haired woman who looked as if she’d recently had her entire mouth removed and had a frown tattooed in its place. I handed her my New York State driver’s license–one of the so-called acceptable forms of I.D.–along with one of my flimsy, totally junky business cards. She looked these items over, shot me a skeptical look, then punched some data into the computer in front of her. She then spun around in her desk chair and stared at the large, humming printer behind her.
We both stared at the printer for awhile. Man, was it ever a big printer. It was the biggest fucking printer I’d ever seen. After a few agonizingly long moments, the printer began to groan, making a sound not unlike the front door of a haunted house opening. Then a small index-card sized piece of cardboard emerged. Without a word, the woman slipped the bit of cardboard into the pocket of a clear plastic envelope that was attached to a lanyard.
She handed the lanyard to me. “That’s your badge,” she said. “Try not to lose it.”
Outside the press room, my need to don the badge became almost physically overwhelming. I found a quiet corner, then inserted my head through the loop of shoestring. I felt like I’d been knighted. I half expected a blast of clarions, or maybe a flock of dirty pigeons to take flight.
I looked at the badge, which, from my perspective, was upside down. It was still warm from the huge printer. Below my name, at the bottom of the badge, was the indicator of who I was here at the convention: MEDIA.
I let the badge fall to my chest. I surveyed the milling crowds below. Everyone was waiting for the clock to strike 10, so that the doors to South, West and Kentia–well, nobody was probably waiting to get into Kentia–would officially open.
With my badge in place, I suddenly felt a great sense of pride and belonging. I felt the day’s momentum shifting in my favor. I was no longer a cash-hemorrhaging banjo-plucking outsider here. I belonged here now. This piece of cardboard hanging around my neck proved that I belonged here now. I belonged here because I was MEDIA.
I got onto the escalator, and as I descended into the crowds, I thought, Look out, you game-loving motherfuckers. Here I come.